During the past four-and-a-half decades, veteran journalist Robert Kaiser says, “politics descended into the toilet.”

Nowadays, members of Congress must spend one, two, even three days a week “dialing for dollars,” Kaiser noted, adding that this occurs persistently, not just in election years.

“It’s not exactly the statesmanship that our Founding Fathers imagined,” he said.

In the same period, certain politics-related industries, such as lobbying, polling and consulting, have thrived.

Kaiser, who has worked for the Washington Post for 46 years, made these comments during a speech Tuesday night at the National Press Club about the skyrocketing cost of political campaigns and the boom of the lobbying industry. Kaiser shares the body of his observations about politics and campaigns in his new 400-page tome So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government.

In 1974, Kaiser said, the average winner of campaigns for a U.S. Senate seat spent about $450,000 — or $1.3 million in current dollars, when adjusted for inflation. Three-and-a-half decades later, during the 2008 election cycle, that amount increased nearly seven-fold.

As the Center for Responsive Politics has calculated, the average winner in a U.S. Senate race last November spent $8.5 million. The average cost of challengers unseating an incumbent senator was even more: nearly $9.8 million. And hotly contest Senate races in medium-sized states like Minnesota and North Carolina, saw the winners spend more than twice those staggering sums, Kaiser also noted.

Campaigning, he said, has been turned over to so-called experts, with ever-shorter television commercials, focus groups, tracking polls and direct mail. And it involves a constant chasing of money. It has affected who runs, and it has turned political leaders into followers, Kaiser said.

Since the late 1970s, the lobbying industry has also boomed.

Kaiser singled out a modern-day Jay Gatsby for this era in So Damn Much Money: Gerald Cassidy, the founder and executive chairman of D.C. lobbying powerhouse Cassidy and Associates.

(Cassidy’s firm has earned more than $292 million since 1998, ranking it second among all firms, according to CRP’s analysis.)

Kaiser described Cassidy as a liberal Democrat who got rich by representing, at the start, only the “good guys,” such as colleges, universities and hospitals. He was one of the inventors of the modern earmark, Kaiser said, helping organizations tap into federal dollars. (He later hired Jack Abramoff as a consultant for a brief period before Abramoff was convicted of corruption.)

Cassidy, Kaiser said, also embodies many stereotypes of an elite D.C. lobbyist: He leases sky boxes at major sports stadiums, he is ferried through D.C. in a chauffeured limousine, he wears $2,500 suits, he owns multi-million dollar real estate and he and his wife have contributed nearly $2 million to federal candidates over the years.

Against this backdrop, more and more government employees have grown envious of the lavish lifestyles and fat paychecks that could come with work in the private sector, Kaiser said. Citing the Center for Responsive Politics, he noted that thousands of people have passed through the “revolving door” from government to K Street — including nearly 200 former members of Congress.

“Lobbyists became a new class of influential Washingtonians,” Kaiser said. “Cashing in on your public service became common place.”

Kaiser asserted that the result of these trends has produced a culture of avoidance.

“It’s much easier to not do something than to do something,” Kaiser said. “The real function of lobbying culture is to stop things from happening, is to play defense.”

On the campaign trail, Kaiser said, President Barack Obama railed against this culture that turns politics into an elite game, and on his second day as president, he went so far as to issue an executive order to “gum up” the revolving door. The order prohibited former lobbyists from working in his administration and barred members of his administration from lobbying for the entire time that Obama is in office if they leave their government posts.

Yet Obama’s battle against lobbying has been fraught with difficulties and critiques, Kaiser said. Exceptions have been made to his executive order, including one for a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist and another for a former Raytheon lobbyist.

And Kaiser called Obama’s prohibition of lobbyists working in his administration too sweeping, noting the president’s reluctance to differentiate good lobbyists from bad ones led to a ban that excludes people who should not be excluded.

A means by which to establish such criteria, though, Kaiser noted, would be a challenge, too. One person’s noble cause is another person’s special interest, he said.

Kaiser said his own prescriptions for ameliorating some side effects of lobbying growth involve transparency. Why not, Kaiser suggested, have each member of Congress report each day on the Internet who they met with and what they discussed?

“Let the world know what’s going on,” he said. But he likewise warned: “All the transparency in the world is only good if people are paying attention.”

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